Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [29]
But earth and heart don't have much of a membrane between them. Sometimes decided on grounds as elusive as that single transposable h, this matter of siting ourselves. Of a place mysteriously insisting itself into us. The saying in our family for possessing plenty of something was that we had oceans of it, and in her final report from the desert to her silent listener on the Ault, my mother provided oceans of reasons why we were struggling back north to precisely what we had abandoned. One adios to Arizona she spoke was economic. So few possibilities for people with a limited supply of money like ourselves to get anywhere in any kind of business. She saw corporate Phoenix and landvending Wickenburg plain: It might be better after the war but I think it will be worse. And the contours of community were beckoning us. We don't just like the idea of being way down here and all our folks in Montana. Valid enough in itself, that need for people and places, friends and family, with well-trodden routes of behavior; home is where, when you gossip there, any hearer knows the who what why.
Yet, yet ... there was unwordable territory, too, in our return to what my mother's letters as early as Phoenix began to mention as home. Refusal to become new atomized Americans, Sun Belt suburbanites, and instead going back to Montana's season-cogged life is one thing. Going back specifically to the roughcut Big Belts, the snakey Sixteen country, the Smith River Valley where we Doigs and Ringers could never quite dodge our own dust, all that is quite another. My parents can only have made such a choice from their bottommost natures, moods deep and inscrutable as the keels of icebergs.
***
Ivan and I were over to see Mom.
My grandmother could hmpf like a member of royalty. She is hmpfing in a major way to my mother, although not at my mother; Grandma's range of fire simply tends to take in the entire vicinity.
"At least I got letters from you, dear. I haven't heard from Wallace and Paul in ages, darn their hides."
Like her, I can't imagine why a mere war keeps them from writing. Here I am at not quite six, same age as the war, and already I am matchless on this matter of correspondence. Isn't my Christmas greeting of merry dive-bombers here on Grandma's kitchen wall as though it were by Michelangelo? How natural it comes, hmpf-proof artistry, when you are the first grandchild and so far the only.
My mother has been shrewd enough to bring me along handy at her side on this diplomatic mission to her own mother. This is not as supple a scene for her as exterminating with Winona. Our first after-Arizona visit to Grandma carries complications that extend back to the Moss Agate years, where this grayhaired much-done-to woman provided my mother with that peculiar girlhood, threadbare and coddled, and now there's a deal more to come which my mother dreads to have to tell.
Say this for the situation, my grandmother never takes long to sort out to you what's on her mind. Rapidfire, she deems our visit tardy (we have been back from Arizona whole weeks) and assigns the logical reason (my father). She is also snorty that this call of ours is going to be so abbreviated (overnight). Her points made, she proceeds to flood us in fresh-baked cinnamon rolls, oatmeal cookies, and all other kinds of doting.
Between pastry feasts we each furnish Grandma our versions of Arizona. Mine is heavier on cactus than my mother's. Both women are tanking up on coffee, and I am intrigued that Grandma cuts